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The Next Big Thing

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The Next Big Thing

By: Anita Brookner
Narrated by: Stephen Thorne
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About this listen

At seventy-three, Herz is facing an increasingly bewildering world. He cannot see his place in it or even work out what to do with his final years. Questions and misunderstandings haunt Herz like old ghosts. Should he travel, sell his flat, or propose marriage to a friend he has not seen in thirty years? The letters he writes and does not send and the passers-by he encounters remind him how out of touch he is, how detached from the modern world. Yet Herz believes that he must do something, only he doesn't know what this next big thing in life should be...

©2002 Anita Brookner (P)2014 Audible, Inc. Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Haunted
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I love Anita Brookner, but this is the second book I've read of hers where the main character is a man, and I am beginning to think she writes less convincingly about men than she does women. This book was extra gloomy and more full of regret and missed opportunities than usual. But somehow I found the male lead less sympathetic than her standard regretful heroines. I really don't believe this is due to me having sexist tendencies.

Not my favourite

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a sensitively told tale of older man and the loneliness of later life spent on one's own. well told and moving. not the most cheerful of stories but a salutory lesson in the importance keeping up one's contacts and being thoughtful of older people who spend too much time alone. we're not exploting this source of experience properly.

thoughful and moving

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Following the TV adaptation of Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner has slipped off the popular culture radar screen for all but those who are prepared to search her out. Unlike the boneless ominpresent Ian McEwan, here is a rare and delicate treat, but with a rock-hard underbelly of brutality buried neatly and carefully enveloped at the heart of this novel. The brutality of our everyday life stripped of all of our small and individual pretensions. And that this Courtauld courtesan can deliver a sledgehammer blow to the bohemian-bourgeois orthodoxy by which we paddle our boats up the high street of life is a continuing joy.

McEwan? - Here's England's best author by far....

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